"The Marriage of Heaven and Howl,"
Part One, Uno, of Tres

Douglas McDaniel

There was the gun. There was the Whore. And there was I, dropping into the topless nightclub, if at first to call the police, then eventually to sample the earthly delights inside.

Wanna dance?

It was on the night I'd decided to write one last memo on the Jungle. A poem, in fact. This Jungle was in a far off city and should not be confused with the Rum Jungle near North Station and the Fleet Center (Boston) is an innocuous example of the form that, certainly, is a home away from home for me in these, my post-divorced male-getting-a-new-divorce era. The Rum Jungle is a good way for a male (or adventurous female) to sit around and wait for a commuter train toward that little woman and the blue light of television fading into dreams in the 'burbs.

However, the new club in the visceral maze of the dug up Hub is downright Victorian in its restricted civility of dancing limited to a center stage, as opposed to your lap. In fact, there's no activity on the floor at all.

Indeed, most of New England, save for the relative outlaw zones of Rhode Island, cage strip bars with such hypocritical restrictions that the contradictions are almost laughable. Such compromises to this promiscuous funhouse of girl-to-boy flirtation in the flesh include Matthews, right off the border of New Hampshire in Tyngsboro, where a self-imposed limit on the distance of a dancer -- while fully nude -- is tastefully represented by the three-foot-rule. This one-yard distance between man and woman is one of the surest safeguards to procreation since the 13th century practice of the Spanish Catholic chaperone. Call it "Air Chastity."

The place is roomy, though, to give one a sense of lift and freedom, and full nudity is always the eventual finale rack. But, all the same, three feet on a fourth and one, as everyone knows, is time for a punt or a field goal.

Most assuredly -- and maybe this is always the point with these temples of temptation -- there will be no touchdowns scored. In the house of pain the bizarre feminine will to create an aura of perfect detachment only reduces a chronically over-sexed male into a spending machine who will, nonetheless, likely go home alone to solve the problem by the device of his own handy imagination. Unless, of course, he comes BYOB (Bring Your Own Babe).

The cold austerity of the place is almost comforting. With my own mood soured by the complete failure of the Empire to fulfill the promise of freedom, free speech, the right to vote and all, as well as the cold power of the Puritan Hub to render most free spirits into subhuman slaves to the Master Machine, I had come to find more honesty in prostitution than any other corporate endeavor.

At least, I felt, a titty bar dancer, if she worked hard enough, could take that Protestant work ethic and turn it into a hyperlink to the American Dream: A condo, a cool car, great vacations, clothes, and any kind of education they might be so inclined to desire. As if they needed one.

I, on the other hand, in refusing to return to my cube, had suffered all kinds of faithless betrayals by my so-called significant chick. And in the proceedings of divorce, SHE wanted all the money, in unlimited measure, at the back end of the deal.


In Rhode Island, specifically Providence, the dancers are the happiest in the whole Eastern Seaboard. They not only touch themselves, they can touch you. There is no pretense. The code of law doesn't create so much hideous conflict. Except, perhaps, when the male of the species enters that primal seek and "gee-don-ya-wanna-let-me-penetrate" mode. In such cases, the law of the jungle rules, as in the force of the bouncer, or, a cold hard slap in the face. Some things are timeless, downright beautiful in their simplicity.

At this particularly lawless Jungle in Phoenix, Arizona, I'd gotten to know a girl; named Victoria. She was one of my favorites. Brown-brunette Victoria was dark and Latin and quite probably bisexual, quite probably a time-worn visual meme of incredible value for many males on the prowl. I liked her best because of the way she liked to push the boundaries of her profession. To Victoria, all was permissible. At this Jungle, there was no code enforcing, apparently, at all. And where there is no code to be enforced, there is very little law.

During the dances, she would touch me the way most women wouldn't, although to their credit or to their detriment, the dancers were out of control at the Jungle, and any day now -- hence, the need for the poem -- the vice squad was bound to clamp down. This place was soon to go down as one the raunchiest nightclubs I'd ever heard of. I was there to record the end of its purple-lit heyday.

In the unabashed underworld of topless dancers and middle-aged men with one-hundred-dollar bills to burn, I have come to find that such entertainments are a great deal more honest than most marriages, since, after all, you at least know what everything is going to cost up front. Anyone who has paid through the nose for a divorce knows what I'm talking about.

Intimacy therapy after a divorce, as in a sudden rush of sensual urges, is much preferred to lawyer fees. It should be part of the expense of any breakup. On this night at the Jungle, after this divorce, I burned fives at first. Then left, then the memories of perfume and breasts and a mental image of cavernous light brought me back, to burn twenties, and finally a one-hundred dollar bill: If only to talk Victoria into coming home with me.

That was the other catch: There was the poem, and, there was the girl. A Neil Young song played in my head, "There ain't a day that goes by that doesn't burn a bit of my soul. There ain't a day that goes by ..."

But on the way to the club, I noticed something different in front of a former radio and television station, I didn't know the name. It was in the 10:30 p.m. shadows of a Fifties-era tower building, used as a flophouse for the dregs of local night fare, the hookers, the heads, the lost sheep of the old studio with a nevertheless long-playing show in the late-20th-century peak of the Southwestern inner-city fall.

Or at least, that is how it seemed, as beneath the old marquee a fight was going on. Two men, two street toughs in T-shirts were beating two other men, as a gang of four others watched with stone faces, looking up at my car lights.

As I drove by, veering right to make the nightclub, I turned and stared, and, stopping at the corner, saw two policemen on bicycles, peering around the corner, fairly relaxed about the deal, talking on small radios. One was laughing. The other was sipping on a bottle of water. There seemed to be a complicit agreement between the two, but then, I was pressing harder on the gas as I cast a cold eye on life, on death, and passed on by.

Still, I recognized one of the men on his back, looking thrashed, his shirt ripped, his arm bloodied, as being from the Jungle, a regular, or maybe some kind of employee. I pulled into the parking lot, thinking of the irony of the fact that the guy who usually monitored the video watching the parking lot was currently being beaten in the front of a theater a block away. Figuring the best thing to do was call the cops, then get on with the night's previously scheduled activities, I made the call at a pay phone outside the bar, and got on to the business of poetry.


I sat in the back, where it was dark, knowing the manager wouldn't be able to see too well over there, and the girls would be able to take liberties.

First. the waitress came and I ordered a beer, and then I smoked and stared, gazed actually, with all of the mystery my performance artist mask could muster. Very quickly the usual occurred: As I watched the performers perform, the performers looked at my performance, too. Indeed, as I'd always found, writing a poem in a strip club as the dancers undulated to the curiosity of someone responding with their pen -- as opposed to their penis -- is the definition of what I like to call "a trade that helps both teams."

Thoughts about the fight outside left me unnerved, energized and things got worse when a police officer poked his head into the entrance and started to speak with a thin young woman in a sequined gown. She looked anemic and overly thin. The manager, a rotund man with a buzz cut haircut, and a barbwire tattoo on each forearm, joined in the discussion. The officer left and the manager looked around, eyed the most curious onlooker for a brief second. But not enough to make the connection that I was the caller, I hoped, and then he walked back to the bar. The music was a subversive, one-hundred-beat per minute summoning of some rhythm devil from the era of trash disco.

Victoria was across the room in a halter top and ripped jeans, dancing with a taller blond woman in a red bra and panties. They stepped up to a dancing platform and moved their bodies together without touching, the electronic bass of the music slow and snaky. Victoria slowly unbuttoned her jeans, pulling them down over her hips and stopping, while the blond drew the left side of her top over her shoulder, exposing a generous breast to her dancing partner.

I decided to stand and move to the bar, where I could get a better view. Clearly, I needed more details for my research.

Victoria's dark Aztecan eyes had a focused glint as she pressed her head onto her partner's cleavage. She then kneeled down, putting her hands on her partner's hips. In the purple light of the place, they were more shadow than skin. My heart raced in a sense of fantasy both lustful and shy and I forgot to write anything at all. Victoria turned her back to the blond, who had pulled her top-piece down over both breasts, and leaned backward, her hips thrust forward and she pulled down her Levis to her ankles.

Then the music was over, the light changed to yellows and reds, and the two came off the stage, heading off in different directions. They re-dressed themselves and arranged dollar bills after picking them up off the stage, hauling in their alms and their underwear at the same time.

Always a cold formal move at the end of these performances that delivers me back to Realityville. Such is the pulse and phony efficiency of half-assed prostitution: The visions never go too far, but the tilt of titillation in the brain has served its purpose, that is, I always want more.

I finished my beer and returned to the back of the room, hoping to catch Victoria's eyes, but she had disappeared through a side door. I sat at a table next to a Japanese man who kept the attention of a ridiculously tall brunette by continuously pulling twenties out of his pocket.

I ordered another beer and thought about how the city has been cordoned off like a soft-porn Beirut, on one side of the town is the brightly lit commercial glaze of condos and franchise retail, while on the other is a grim dance between the cops and the crack heads; a city shut off between the poor, the very never will be, and the sweet and safe and mundane lives of car insurance salesmen and their wives mall-dressed in tennis regatta for their brief jaunts between shoe sales and the kids' soccer games.

Victoria appeared from out of the side door with a cigarette in her hand. Now she's wearing a white satin nightie. She begins a series of stops from table to table asking for a dance. In the corner of my eye I see the same cop who had come in before asking questions, and again he's talking to the manager, who is waving his arms as they argue, eventually pointing the cop toward the door. The officer leaves again and by this time Victoria is whispering into the ear of the Japanese guy in a blue suit, who smokes a cigarette and reacts to her body's motions with the stiff decorum of the subject who must not act on his impulses.

The manager heads out of the door of the club and the music blares Van Halen's version of "Beautiful Woman." I think: All life is a kind of choreography.

Victoria pulls the white nightie over her belly and leans into the man in the blue suit, looking over to me with a slight recognizing smile.

I look up to the purple sunset ceiling, a lavender salad, lights pulsing red, orange, while a busty woman undulates on the stage with pelvic pride.

The energy is almost too much as the blue lights flash in the quantum excess of sensuals overwrought.

"What's up," I ask Victoria as she finally makes it to me.

"I guess you are," she says, sitting down on a chair next to mine as she pulls her nightie strap back over her shoulder. She looks at my small notebook on the table and asks, "What are you writing?"

"I'm writing a last poem about this place," I say. "You and I both know that the girls go too far here. They are going to shut it down sure as shit. So this is a final elegy, an exit chapter, for how wild this place is."

"It's not bad," she blinks, "but I'm probably leaving anyway ... and then, who knows, I think maybe I'll go to Colorado."

"Colorado sounds nice. Why don't we go together."

"I don't think so," she says. "Would you like a dance."

"I'd like more than that. Why don't you come home with me. I'll take care of you for a few days and you can just lay around and swim. I'll pay for everything."

"We're not supposed to fraternize with the customers here," she says, fraternizing, nodding her head toward the bar. "Outside of this place, that is."

Her hair is down to her shoulders with a little strand hanging down over her eyes. She puts a small hand on my knee as she stands up, pushing out her chest to begin the dance.

"Spread your legs," she says, putting a hand softly behind my neck.

I'm distracted, thinking about how I'm going to convince this girl to go home with me.

The music begins and she presses her knees into my inner thighs, leaning over me, touching my nose with her right breast. Moving down, she puts her head in my lap, slightly pressing down, and then back up, crossing her hand across my crotch, lingering there in the dark, pressing down to feel me and smiling a wicked little grin. Then she turns her back and pulls off the top of her little tiny gown, leaning back into me and dragging her head and hair down my chest to my stomach and then my groin.

I groan, saying, "I'll do a dance for you." I can barely breathe.

Then the dance is over and I put a ten in her garter, gently brushing her thigh with the back of my hand. She says "thanks," that she'll come back later, and goes on the next table, then the next, getting another dance as the music begins again.

This is the heart, pulse, ebb and flow of the life of any real city, and all of our pretty words are mere faint decorations compared to the casual and fair exchanges of those who are still relatively free. But if you wanna dance, make love as if God loves porno, well then, tell me: What is that siren I hear? And what is that commotion at the door?

COMMENTS? QUESTIONS? Go ahead and e-mail Doug.